Rock Star

From one end, this concrete and glass house looks as if it had burst through the rocks on which it stands. From the other, it seems to nestle into them, a civilized shelter in a wild setting. Of course, the reality involves inspired design and engineering, but the appearance is magical nonetheless.

The house was designed as a weekend getaway for Merrill Wright, a Seattle resident, by Tom Kundig, of the local firm Olson Kundig Architects, who is known for houses that are both elegantly rugged and eminently livable. It occupies a 15-acre site in the San Juan Islands off Washington State. A compact, 2,200-square-foot box with a sod roof and tall steel-framed windows, the house consists of a main space, 61 feet long and 12 feet high, with a large kitchen at the back and a living and dining area overlooking the water up front. There’s also a master bedroom and sitting room as well as a small guest room on the main floor, and another guest room tucked beneath the house. What looks like a wood-sided boxcar pierces the house at the kitchen end; it contains a utility shed outdoors and a pantry-laundry room and bookcases indoors. (Chris Gerrick was the project manager, and Charlie Fairchild worked with Wright on the interiors.)

‘‘I always knew there would be a big room at either end,’’ Kundig said; one room would offer ‘‘prospect’’ and the other ‘‘refuge,’’ a duality that the architect considers important to the design of houses, including his own, where the living room commands an expansive view of Puget Sound, while the kitchen and master bedroom look into an intimate garden.

The site’s rocky outcropping seemed to Kundig a perfect place to put the house; it reminded him of Native American cliff dwellings or Greek and Italian hill towns. ‘‘Our ancestors did not put their houses on the most fertile parts of the land,’’ he explained. Not that Wright needed land; she has plenty to spare and has been busy tending it herself, adding plants and trees (200 of the latter so far, with 100 more planned for next year). But she was taken with Kundig’s idea.

‘‘At the end of the project,’’ Wright said, ‘‘I realized that what I wanted was a fortress. He just knew that. And he got this ‘inside the rock’ thing. It wasn’t going to be sitting on the rock; it was going to be in the rock.’’

Being in the rock involved blasting and cutting into it, not just for the house itself but for the long, narrow passage to the front door; the hearths of the back-to-back indoor and outdoor fireplaces; and the master bathroom sink, where water runs down through a series of small bowls that were cut into the rock and polished smooth. ‘‘Rock breaks in its own way,’’ Kundig said, comparing the process to ‘‘pulling a thread out of a sweater.’’ A key player in this somewhat risky business was Jim Dow of the builders Schuchart/Dow. ‘‘It’s hard to imagine we could have pulled it off without him,’’ Kundig recalled. The fact that the process left a lot of boulders was a plus: ‘‘I had always wanted to put boulders together and put glass between them,’’ Kundig said. So they became a carport that is part Mies van der Rohe, part Fred Flintstone.

Inside, Wright’s house is what all modern houses should be: generally elegant and clean-lined but cluttered and homey in all the right places. In the kitchen, a table with a fossil brown limestone top, a mustard yellow settee and a pair of Hans Wegner lounge chairs mark the owner’s favorite spot; there, she reads and works in front of the TV that is built into the bookcase. The living-dining room is a mixture of simple upholstered furniture, antiques and the contemporary art that Wright, a mother of two, has collected over the last 20 years or so. ‘‘Art was our fifth sibling,’’ she said of her upbringing; her parents, Bagley and Virginia Wright, are prominent art collectors and philanthropists, and her three actual siblings are all involved in the art world.

Wright’s own taste in interiors was shaped in part by the ‘‘two frightening years’’ she spent working for Jean Jongeward, the legendary Seattle decorator who was known for her sophisticated yet comfortable interiors. Wright called her a “taskmaster,’’ but it’s clear that she learned well. These rooms are grown-up but never fussy or forbidding; you’re happily caught between a rock and a soft place.